Welcome to the Biggest Diet Week of the Year for Men

It’s after the Super Bowl, not New Year’s, that men most want to shed some pounds

If you’re one of the 6 percent of Americans who called in sick today because you overdid it during the Super Bowl, you might want to spend the time thinking about a new diet. A survey says the biggest day for men to start shedding pounds should not be New Years, but the day after the Super Bowl. Harris Interactive polled 1,283 Super Bowl fans for Nutrisystem and found that about a quarter of men gained weight during the season, averaging 10 pounds, and at least for the year 2013, male customers doubled their orders for Nutrisystem weight-loss plans that day.

Of course, Nutrisystem just wants to sell more Nutrisystem, but the idea that the Super Bowl could be a bigger weight-loss motivator than New Year’s isn’t crazy. In spite of hundreds of guides to healthier snacking that encourage you to opts for carrots over chips, the average American will consume 6,000 calories on Super Bowl Sunday (and even more the next day if your favorite team lost) — a startling number discovered in a survey of 200 households inquiring whether people had kept their New Year’s Resolutions (they hadn’t).

And it’s not just game day itself. Football season can involve months of dedication to sitting on your ass and consuming large quantities of garbage food — that’s billions of pounds of wings, pizza, chips and salsa, guacamole, and beer by the truckload (at least a gallon per person, according to Men’s Fitness and several unnamed sources here at MEL). Super Bowl Sunday is topped only by Thanksgiving as the single largest food consumption day annually, according to the USDA. And it’s so much shit food that 7-Eleven claims their antacid sales go up by 20 percent the day after the Bowl, too.

Unfortunately, you can’t just crap out those extra calories. Guides to mitigating the post-Bowl blues suggest drinking a lot of water, cutting out snacking between meals and recalibrating your appetite by eating things that resemble actual food. Also, working out.

But there are other far more motivating ways to drop a few pounds that don’t involve turning into a gym rat. New research has found that new relationships aid in weight loss, because the serotonin boost they provide is linked to higher metabolism. Of course, it would be much easier to chat up a new romantic interest if you didn’t feel so bloated. Maybe give it a day or two?

Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.